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August 21, 2011

Romer's Creative U.S. Debt Accounting (Guest Post)

Christina Romer is one on the leading liberal economist in the nation. She’s no dummy. Valedictorian from Princeton, PHD from MIT, former Chairperson of the Council of Obama’s council of Economic Advisors and now she is a professor of economics at U.C. Berkley. She’s also a liar.

Ms Romer penned a piece for the NYT over the weekend. This was her plea for, guess what, more fiscal and monetary stimulus.

Romer acknowledges that US public sector debt is already too high. But she argues that we are nowhere near the levels that were reached post WWII. Her words:

"At the end of World War II, that ratio hit 109 percent — one and a half times as high as it is now."

One and a half times, Ms Romer? (This equates to a debt to GDP of 72%) Where does that number come from? A few facts:

First, total debt is now $14.588 Trillion. From Treasury Direct:

GDP as measured by the BLS was running a tad over $15 billion as of the most recent read. From BLS:

Current-dollar GDP -- the market value of the nation's output of goods and services -- increased 3.7 percent, or $136.0 billion, in the second quarter to a level of $15,003.8 billion.

Put the two together and the actual debt to GDP is currently at 97.25% (and rapidly rising). We will exceed the 100% barrier over the next six months.

What Ms Romer has done to spin her number is to exclude all of the debt ($4.7 Trillion) of the nation that is held by the Intergovernmental Accounts ("IG"). This is fast and loose economics. Ms. Romer knows that. But she elects to mislead the public with a totally false claim.

Does Romer think the debts owed to Social Security, Medicare, Military Pensions and Federal employees pension funds don’t count? If she takes that position, she is flat wrong. I maintain that the Intergovernmental debts are much more toxic to the economy than the debt held by the public.

The simple reason is that the Intergovernmental Accounts have to be paid back in full. The process of running down the intergovernmental Accounts has already started. It will accelerate very rapidly for the next decade. Every penny of the draw down of these accounts MUST result in an increase in debt held by the public.

The US has a huge outstanding of debt to the public. But neither the interest on that debt or the principal has to be paid back. This debt can be rolled over to a new maturity and a new investor. That happens virtually every single day. That is not the case with the Intergovernmental account. All of those Special Issue Treasury notes held by the various government agencies are going to come due over the next 20 years. When that happens it will result in a dollar for dollar increase in Debt to Public. Exactly the worst possible outcome.

Ignoring the IG debt and only focusing on the debt held by the public is a dangerous thing to do. It is the worst form of denial. To ignore the IG account is equivalent of ignoring the crisis in Medicare and Social Security. But that is precisely what Romer would have our policy makers do.

It’s true that the US economy is running at a pace that is too slow to create enough jobs. I think this is a structural issue. We have a rapidly aging population. We have, for years, been losing our manufacturing base. We have outsourced ourselves to high unemployment and a soft economy. That problem will take years of hard work (and sacrifice) to reverse. Insane levels of deficit spending and an (equally) insane monetary policy that just steals from savers and promotes inflation are not going to address our fundamental weakness.

Ms Romer is one of the Deep Water economists (either coast) who are pushing for more and more debt and more and more spending. She is entitled to her opinion, but she in not entitled to lie about it.

About The Author - Bruce Krasting had worked on Wall Street for 25 years--"For 25 years I woke up thinking, "What am I going to do today to make some money in the market". I don't do that any longer. But I miss it." Nowadays, Bruce blogs about his take on financial events at Bruce Krasting. (EconMatters author archive here.)

The views and opinions expressed herein are the author's own, and do not necessarily reflect those of EconMatters.